Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

by Butler, Daniel Allen

  Before the attack began Rommel took time to post another letter to Lucie; like so many of his letters, this one says much in a few words, and offers an insight into his thoughts and feelings that were never revealed elsewhere. Some of Rommel’s old energy and drive had returned to him now that he was advancing again, but for the first time, there is also an acknowledgment that the war in North Africa might not be his to win after all.

  30 Aug. 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  Today has dawned at last. It’s been such a long wait worrying all the time whether I should get everything I needed together to enable me to take the brakes off again. Many of my worries have been by no means satisfactorily settled and we have some very grave shortages. But I’ve taken the risk, for it will be a long time before we get such favorable conditions of moonlight, relative strengths, etc., again. I, for my part, will do my utmost to contribute to success. As for my health, I’m feeling quite on top of my form. There are such big things at stake. If our blow succeeds, it might go some way towards deciding the whole course of the war. If it fails, at least I hope to give the enemy a pretty thorough beating.187

  Rommel’s attack jumped off at nightfall on August 30, with the Italian Littorio and Ariete Armored Divisions, along with the 90th Light Division, screening the left flank of the two panzer divisions. The full moon which was to have provided just enough light to allow the Axis armor to navigate across what was literally a trackless waste instead became a beacon guiding British bombers and fighter-bombers to the columns of German and Italian tanks. The 21st Panzer Division lost its commanding officer, General Georg von Bismarck, killed when he stepped on land mine, just after midnight. The attack fell behind schedule, but late in the morning of August 31, the 15th Panzer and then the 21st Panzer began their attacks on Ruweisat Ridge in a one-two punch. A furious tank battle ensued, which lasted the remainder of the day, with neither side gaining a decisive advantage; at sunset Rommel called a halt to the attack: the Afrika Korps would be back the next day.

  British bombers returned during the night, the Axis supply lines their targets this time; the fuel lost in these raids forced Rommel to immobilize the 21st Panzer—he lacked the gasoline to keep both divisions running. At sunrise the 15th Panzer was at it again, but its attack on Ruweisat Ridge was stopped when the 8th Armoured Brigade struck at its right flank. Meanwhile yet another calamity befell Rommel’s supply columns, when a squadron of armored cars from the 4th Armoured Brigade, ranging far behind the Axis lines, shot up a convoy of 300 trucks carrying fuel for the panzer divisions. This was the final straw for Rommel, and he called off the attack. Over the next five days the German and Italian troops would fall back to their start line, harassed every inch of the way by the Desert Air Force. Montgomery unwisely tried to counterattack while the Afrika Korps withdrew: two New Zealand brigades suffered heavy losses before Montgomery called them off; after that he was content to let the panzers withdraw unhindered. The drubbing given to the New Zealanders played into Montgomery’s intention of continuing the buildup begun by Auchinleck, so that he would eventually be able to attack Rommel in overwhelming force.

  Rommel broke the news to Lucie on September 4:

  Dearest Lu,

  Some very hard days lie behind me. We had to break off the offensive for supply reasons and because of the superiority of the enemy air force although victory was otherwise ours. Well, it can’t be helped. Made a quick call at H.Q. for the first time today, even had my boots off and washed my feet. I’m still hoping that the situation can be straightened out. All my wishes to you and Manfred.188

  Despite the brave face he put on the situation, Rommel knew that this was the end of the line. Panzerarmee Afrika had gone far, well beyond what anyone ever imagined it could, but flesh and blood had their limits, and while Rommel’s soldiers, German and Italian alike, had given him everything they could, they had nothing left. They would go no farther.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EL ALAMEIN

  A commander is not protected by an order from a minister or prince who is absent from the theater of operations and has little or no knowledge of the most recent turn of events. Every commander responsible for executing a plan that he considers bad or disastrous is criminal.

  —BONAPARTE

  Panzerarmee Afrika’s defeat at the Alam Halfa ridge just west of El Alamein triggered a seismic shift in Axis and Allied strategy in the Mediterranean theater, and Erwin Rommel knew it. The situation that now obtained would allow for no reprise of the aftermath of Crusader: there would be no opportunity to fall back, regroup, and try again. Rommel and his army would have to fight where they stood.

  Three factors had been key to the Axis defeats in July and September, and Rommel was certain that they were the shape of things to come: the ongoing strangulation of his supply lines, the growing power of the Desert Air Force, and the steadily increasing numbers of Allied troops and equipment opposing him. Not knowing about Ultra, Rommel continued to suspect Italian treachery in the destruction of so many ships carrying supplies to North Africa, but whatever the causes may have been, what was undeniable was that for the first eight months of 1942, only 40 percent of the total tonnage needed to sustain his divisions actually reached Panzerarmee Afrika. A significant amount of the missing tonnage was being siphoned off for the increasing numbers of reinforcements Mussolini inexplicably kept sending to the garrison in Tripoli, troops Rommel desperately needed to bring his depleted Italian divisions back up to something approaching their nominal strength, but which Il Duce adamantly refused to release for frontline service. The Italians could not, of course, prevent German reinforcements and equipment from reaching the Afrika Korps, but those simply were not forthcoming: the massive German offensive in southern Russia, and especially the battle for Stalingrad, had first call on whatever replacements and materiel the Wehrmacht could produce. The supply problem was by no means insoluble, but to effect a solution would require a shift in Germany’s strategic priorities which Hitler and O.K.W. were unwilling to make. North Africa had always been a sideshow, and would remain so until the situation was beyond retrieval, no matter what the Wehrmacht might do.

  The issue of air power was even more problematic. From the first day of the war the German Army had never fought a campaign in which it did not enjoy air superiority, if not outright air supremacy. Now, in Egypt, the Desert Air Force had not merely contested control of the skies above the battlefield, but actually wrested it away from the Luftwaffe, flying as many as a thousand sorties a day. British bombers staged raids day or night whenever conditions were favorable, while RAF fighter-bombers went hunting daily for targets of opportunity. The casualties from any individual attack were usually light, but the cumulative losses grew into a significant drain on German and Italian manpower and equipment. Additionally, the constant threat of Allied air power inhibited movement by Axis units and soon a simmering level of anxiety began to permeate Rommel’s entire command, adding to the strain already inflicted on his officers and men by the harsh desert environment and the stresses of combat.

  It also began influencing Rommel’s tactical thinking as well, compelling him to recognize that with their movements restricted by Allied air power, his armored and mechanized units could no longer rely on their mobility to increase their effectiveness in bolstering Panzerarmee Afrika’s defenses. This created for Rommel what in some circles was characterized as unnecessary pessimism but which was, in fact, a healthy appreciation of the handicaps which would chronically plague the Wehrmacht for the remainder of the war.

  Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success. And since there was no foreseeable hope, with the German Luftwaffe so severely stretched in other theaters, of Kesselring receiving aircraft reinforcements in any way comparable with those flowing to the British, we had to face the likelihood of the R.A.F. sho
rtly gaining absolute air supremacy. . . .

  The fact of British air superiority threw to the winds all the tactical rules which we had hitherto applied with such success. There was no real answer to the enemy’s air superiority, except a powerful air force of our own. In every battle to come the strength of the Anglo-American air force was to be the deciding factor.189

  The problem of replacements was at once the thorniest and most urgent of all, for a surfeit of supplies and an ever-victorious Luftwaffe overhead would matter little if Rommel lacked the men and equipment needed to hold the line against the coming British offensive. Rommel’s passing mention of “the Anglo-American air force” looms large in its own way: he was sufficiently sharp-eyed to be able to note that not all the low-flying aircraft bombing and strafing his armored columns and troop positions wore the blue-white-and-red roundels of the Royal Air Force. Some of them bore the white stars in dark blue disks of the United States Army Air Force: not only were American-made weapons being brought to bear, but American manpower was now being thrown into the balance against the panzerarmee. German manpower was being stretched to its limits everywhere, so there was no chance that Rommel would ever again be able to muster anything approaching parity with the numbers that Eighth Army would put into the field, yet there was a minimum number of troops Rommel would require if there was to be a successful defense of his own Ala-mein position. He would shortly begin a medical leave in Germany, and while there he would personally present to Hitler his report on Panzerarmee Afrika’s situation and demand that it be properly reinforced.

  Rommel had mixed feelings about leaving North Africa when the decisive battle of the campaign was clearly approaching. General der Panzertruppe Georg Stumme was scheduled to arrive in mid-September to serve as Rommel’s deputy in the field marshal’s absence. Stumme was a veteran of the Russian Front and the former commander of Rommel’s old unit, the 7th Panzer Division, in its original incarnation as the 2nd Light Division, and while no one questioned Stumme’s competence as a commander, no one imagined him to be a leader of Rommel’s caliber.

  9 Sept. 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  My health is now fairly well restored and I hardly think anybody would notice anything. However, the doctor is pressing me hard to have a break in Germany and doesn’t want me to postpone it any longer. But Stumme must first arrive and be installed in his job. On the one hand, I’m overjoyed at the prospect of getting away for a while and seeing you, but on the other I fear I shall never be free of anxiety about this place, even though I won’t be able to get to the front myself. I know Churchill is supposed to have said that he will only be able to hold Egypt a few months longer, but I’m more inclined to think that he’s considering launching a new offensive with superior forces in four to six weeks’ time. A victory for us in the Caucasus is the only thing that would stop him.

  Now Gause is unfit for tropical service and has to go away for six months. Things are also not looking too good with Westphal, he’s got jaundice. Lt-Col. von Mellenthin is leaving today with amoebic dysentery. One of the divisional commanders was wounded yesterday, so that every divisional commander and the Corps Commander have been changed inside ten days.190

  Rommel did his best to give Stumme whatever advantages he could, and the panzerarmee did have some. The same tactical situation at El Alamein which had denied Rommel the opportunity to employ his usual tactics of speed and maneuver in a sweeping flanking move around the southern end of the enemy line now worked in his favor. The relatively narrow front, anchored by the Mediterranean to the north and the Qattara Depression to the south, denied the Eighth Army any chance to outflank the Axis defenses. Any attack on Panzerarmee Afrika would have to go through it, not around it. In order to make this as difficult a proposition as possible, Rommel displayed a hitherto unsuspected talent, one for positional warfare. The same eye for ground that sought out cover and concealment for the movements of his abteilung in Romania and Italy in the First World War he now put to work identifying the positions where cover and concealment, along with surprise, would allow his infantry to inflict serious losses on any attacking force while keeping their own casualties to a minimum. He brought considerable imagination in preparing his army for the coming confrontation (certainly more than was being displayed by the new commanding officer of Eighth Army), to the point of developing, with the panzerarmee’s staff, contingency plans for defeating any amphibious landing on the Egyptian coast that might be mounted simultaneously with the imminent British offensive.

  That a coordinated land and seaborne attack at El Alamein might be in the offing was a reasonable conclusion drawn from a series of coastal and inland commando-style raids carried out in September 1942, operations against Axis rear areas as far distant as Benghazi. The purpose of these raids was varied, from disrupting Axis supply lines, to sabotaging German and Italian airfields, to attempts to free Allied prisoners of war. This last was the objective of the largest of these raids, an attack on Tobruk that would, it was hoped, rescue some or even all of the 16,000 British POWs held there. The raid was a monumental failure: the British suffered nearly 800 casualties as well as the loss of a cruiser and two destroyers; the Axis forces suffered just 66 dead and wounded, along with the loss of about 30 aircraft. The audacity of the raid had impressed Rommel, but little else of it did.

  16 September 1942

  Dearest Lu,

  Arrived back last night from Tobruk. You’ll no doubt have been pleased to hear the special communiqué about the abortive landing. Everything seems to be under control again now. Stumme is arriving in Rome to-day. I hope to start in a week’s time. Kesselring came this morning, after I’d seen and talked to him yesterday in Tobruk. He’d come from the Führer’s H.Q. The battle for Stalingrad seems to be very hard and is tying up a lot of forces which we could make better use of in the south. . . .191

  The Libyan desert was not, of course, the only place where British commandos and similar irregular forces were active. In July 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the creation of the Special Operations Executive, with orders for the new organization to “set Europe ablaze;” in practical terms this translated into espionage, sabotage, and aiding local resistance movements in occupied Europe. Commando units, which carried out some of the same missions, were organized at the same time under the Combined Operations Headquarters; later the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS), both operating in the Mediterranean, were added to the irregulars’ ranks. They proved to be something of a thorn in the flesh to the Axis in Libya, though not quite to the degree which later hagiography would maintain. They were very good at sabotage operations, but other efforts were less than memorable.

  [The SAS] tried again and again to incite the Arabs against us, fortunately with little success, for there is nothing so unpleasant as partisan warfare. It is perhaps very important not to make reprisals on hostages at the first outbreak of partisan warfare, for these only create feelings of revenge and serve to strengthen the partisans. It is better to allow an incident to go unavenged than to hit back at the innocent. It only agitates the whole neighbourhood, and hostages easily become martyrs. The Italian commander shared my view, and so the occasional Arab raid was usually overlooked.192

  These comments by Rommel must loom very large in any assessment of his character and moral compass, especially in light of Wehrmacht conduct elsewhere in Europe. Upon first reading, they seem to be the realistic, pragmatic reaction of an honorable soldier determined to carry out his duties with that honor intact. Rommel’s words assume an entirely new significance when held up against what would become known as the “Commando Order,” a personal directive from Adolf Hitler, issued on October 18, 1942, decreeing that any enemy combatant captured while engaged in espionage, sabotage or any other “irregular” activity, whether in uniform or not, was to be summarily executed. Only 12 copies of this order were made, to be individually hand-carried to the Wehrmacht’s various Army Group headquarters. By the time Rommel recei
ved his copy, he had already departed North Africa for Germany to begin his medical leave, and returned when the long-awaited British offensive at El Alamein began. After the war, the commander of the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion would state categorically that he watched Rommel burn his copy; in any event, no trace of it would ever be found anywhere among the files, documents, and war diaries of Panzerarmee Afrika.193

  In any event, while the British desert raiders might be annoying, regardless of whatever Berlin thought of them, they were insignificant in the larger strategic picture Rommel saw. That picture may well have been flawed, for he knew little about the realities of operations on the Russian Front, nevertheless, the point he made to Lucie in his letter of September 16 about the O.K.W.’s tunnel vision toward the war in the Soviet Union was valid. There was a strategic opportunity in North Africa which was being wasted in the growing battle of egos along the Volga between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. By now Rommel had little if any faith remaining in “Plan Orient”—if indeed he had ever seen it as more than an intellectual exercise. Still, all throughout the summer of 1942 there was the possibility of shifting the strategic balance in the Mediterranean decisively in the Axis’ favor with the commitment of a fraction of the forces that were destroying Stalingrad to no genuine strategic purpose. If the British were given the time to finish their preparations and launch their attack as they chose, once it began the initiative in North Africa would irretrievably pass to Eighth Army and its new commanding officer. Ironically, given that he would become almost inextricably linked with Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps, he was the least of Rommel’s concerns at the moment.